Know Your Students

On a cold Monday afternoon in December, undergraduates study silently in the ornate reading room of a mid-sized university library. One floor down in the reference area, groups of four or five students work together, speaking in muffled voices. The reference librarian seated near the center of the room glances around, noting that students seem more intent as the end of the semester approaches. Such a scene might occur on any late fall day at the University of Rochester's Rush Rhees Library, NY. But this year, something atypical was happening just down the hall. In a conference room, the library's lead anthropologist, Nancy Fried Foster, sat interviewing a first-year student who, pen in hand, answered questions and sketched a visual representation of her responses. The anthropologist, assisted by a librarian holding a video camera, was not asking questions about the library, not yet anyway. Instead, she asked the student to describe from start to finish, step by step, how she wrote her research paper for her first-year writing class that semester.

Foster: So, as we talk, I want you to just draw pictures, and you can do stick figures, you can just write things down and make circles and squares.

Student: Like things that I do in my research?

Foster: Well, the first thing I want to ask is about when you received the assignment. Can you show me when that happened?

Student: Show you?

Foster: Yeah, you receiving the assignment.

Student: [laughter] I'm not a great drawer.

Foster: You've already got an A for this. In fact, you've already sold this work of art, so you can't go wrong.

Student: How I received the assignment? I'm sitting at the desk, and then that's [the instructor]....

This inquiry grew out of a sense that even with our daily encounters with undergraduates, we did not really know our students that well. We wanted to know what students do from morning to night, how they approach their academic work, and how they interact with libraries and librarians within the context of everything else they do.

Inspired by an earlier Institute of Museum and Library Services–funded study of faculty work practices with faculty participation, staff at the University of Rochester, River Campus Libraries, decided to get answers to these questions by using ethnographic methodology. Under Foster's guidance, teams of librarians and staff conducted a two-year investigation. The goal: to improve the libraries' reference services, facilities, and web pages to meet the needs of our undergraduates better.

Ethnographic methods provide new approaches for listening, asking questions, and observing. After initial planning and forming a project team, we sought permission to conduct the research from our university's Research Subjects Review Board, which require high sensitivity to confidentiality and informed student consent. Team members practiced ethnographic techniques by doing observation exercises and videotaping interviews conducted by Foster. Later, we used additional methods to help answer other questions that arose during our research (see “Inside the Study,” p. 29).

We started with a series of “retrospective” interviews with students who had recently completed research papers. Through the interviews, we explored how and when they thought about their assignments, some of their assumptions, other activities that intermingled or competed with working on the assignments, and problems they worked through to complete them. Common details began to emerge, as well as individual differences. One student's drawing showed that she worked on her research paper in multiple steps and received frequent feedback from her professor.

In response to broader interest in the research among library staff, we initiated coviewing sessions, wherein eight to ten staffers watched videos of interviews and discussed our impressions. These sessions gave staff an opportunity to hear directly from students and to reflect collectively on what we heard. We had been instructed that our goal was not to judge students but to remark on how their words gave us a new perspective or surprised us—how what we heard gave us greater insight into our work with students. For example, in one coviewing session, we heard a student say, “Well, I had this huge paper for my history seminar. That was really like the paper of the semester, and this [other] one was just going to have to happen. So I decided to do this one first. So I needed to really focus on this one first because the deadlines were so early.”

At this point, a librarian raised his hand, and the moderator paused the video. The librarian then shared that this statement had triggered an awareness of how the student was doing her best to manage her very busy schedule. She seemed to care about her academic work but needed to prioritize one research paper over another.

We also looked for themes across interviews. For example, by systematically coding interviews, we realized that students often mentioned the library—it was a place they frequented, an online destination when working on papers, and, in one student's words, a place to find “articles, books, and random stuff.” References to a librarian, however, particularly as someone known or familiar to students, were less frequent. Often, it was only with prodding that a student might say, “Oh, yeah, I think we met with a librarian....” When one student was asked if her instructor led the “information session” she attended in the library, she replied, “About how to research it? No, I don't even know who it was, just someone who works in the library.”

More than any specific finding, this project helped us get to know our students on a deeper level. This came not only from interviews about research papers but through a variety of other methods, as well. For instance, we gave students disposable cameras and asked them to take photos showing their own overview of our campus. We asked them to draw on maps to show where they went on a single day. We invited them to design workshops to draw an ideal library space or create a tool that would best support their life on campus. In addition, Foster and David Lindahl, another project team member, videotaped two late-night visits to student dorms to capture a sense of dorm life. These visits helped illuminate an area of students' experience that was virtually unknown to us. Together, our investigations gave us a window, as much as possible, into student life from the students' perspective.

We found that our students differed from one another in meaningful ways. There was no single manner in which students wrote research papers or made use of the library. For library staff, this was an important reminder that we needed varying types of online interfaces and in-person services to meet students' varying ambitions and learning styles, their academic level (i.e., first-year student or senior), and their preferences for how to study (i.e., group study, quiet spaces, etc.). In addition, while the library is the center of librarians' universe, for students the library is only one part of academic life. From an undergraduate standpoint, professors, the bursar's office, the gym, etc., are each important and should ideally be integrated to meet students' needs.

Specific stories that our students shared provided many “aha” moments for us. For example, one student, through a mapping diary, surprised us with how extraordinarily busy he was, on the go from 8:30 a.m. until 12:30 a.m. the next morning, only stopping to eat meals at 3:30 p.m. and before going to bed. Another insight: while laptops are certainly an important part of many students' study routines, we learned that it often does not make sense for them to carry their laptops all day. One student told us, “I will occasionally bring my laptop, in which case I use it until the battery runs out and that's pretty much it. It's a heavy laptop, it's like 12 pounds. I don't like to haul it around. If I really need it, I have a memory stick I plug in somewhere.”

Another concurred, saying, “[T]his entire year I carried [my laptop] around three or four times, because it weighs a ton.” This told us students continue to need access to public computers with a consistent desktop across locations and as similar as possible to what they have in their dorms—we have since worked with campus IT to have the same software available on computers in the libraries and student labs. When students do bring laptops to the library, they are usually planning to stay a while and need a way to lock up laptops for safety while they take breaks. They also need to be able to eat and drink while doing their work.

We already knew that students worked late, much later than reference librarians. We emerged from our coviewing and brainstorming meetings committed to respond with service. We decided to pilot a night owl library program where, during peak times of the semester, we extended reference desk service two to four hours later in the evening. Even though we're certainly not “night owls” in undergraduate terms, we adjusted to meet student demand better. The pilot was successful, and, with some modifications, Night Owls continue to help students at peak paper times.

One night in the student union, we conducted interviews with undergrads who were currently writing a research paper and learned that many of them rarely, if ever, interact with a librarian. These students told us that faculty are the subject experts. Also, students were most likely to think of librarians in terms of books, not in relation to online or subject expertise. One librarian described this result as a “wake-up call.” How could we position ourselves in relation to faculty and students so that they see librarians as a vital part of student success. Several librarians tried to respond to this problem by literally spending time in students' shoes: to sit in selectively, with permission from faculty, on undergraduate classes. This exposure allowed us to hear what the student hears in class and to discern better what the faculty member expects. “Being there” added a new level to our relationship with faculty and gave us new visibility and credibility.

Through our research, we have developed an appreciation for how both students and parents can act as advocates for the library. In a cell phone/email age, students often remain connected with their family. One student said, “I talk on the computer to all my friends from home and my brother and my grandpa.” As students maintain ties with home, they discuss paper topics and how to find sources. They'll also ask parents to edit their papers. For example, one student talked about how she “emailed [the paper] to my dad to read over,” while another student mentioned that her mother “edits all my papers.” We exploited the potential to link to students through their parents when the first-year orientation planners offered us an opportunity to host the breakfast for parent orientation. Amid bagels and fruit in the library, we reassured parents that their son or daughter would do well here and talked about our subject librarians and other library programs. Well received by librarians and parents for two years, this breakfast is likely to become a library tradition.

Similarly, we heard from students that while they were reluctant to ask a librarian for help, they might seek assistance from friends. One student talked about the role of older students as mentors, saying, “I had friends who were older, so I knew that you had to take this class, and [the class] covered all different topics, and you had to write a paper.” Another student commented, “I had friends who worked [in the library], so I'd just ask them.” We realized that our avid library users could teach their peers about library resources. We now see our students as partners in this process and take advantage of those who are savvy about library research.

This study, from the methods used to the results, has motivated library staff. Many of us experienced a subtle but important shift in how we think about and approach our work. We've been stimulated and invigorated by becoming attentive observers and seeing students with a researcher's eyes. As one staff member put it, the study “engendered a shared understanding” among staff that made “things I knew in an intellectual way…now more real.” The changes that came about were not from any official administrative initiative but from individual librarians experimenting with new ideas. As one librarian observed, the project “fostered innovation in small grass-roots ways...with a new exploratory openness to trying things.”